Jonathan Daniel Brown | Horseshoe Theory / 2017

the end is coming

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Daniel Brown and Travis Harrington (screenplay), Jonathan Daniel Brown (director) Horseshoe Theory / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

The title of this short film from 2017, Horseshoe Theory, centers about the political theory that argues that the far-left and far-right of the political spectrum actually curve and resemble each other. Only, the examples presented here, a Nazi, KKK-supporting southern boy Bobbo (Jackson Rathbone) and an ISIS supporter Abdul (Amir Malaklou) in this case actually both represent rightest ideologies to my way of thinking, and I don’t quite see where ISIS, who support the most conservative concepts of the Koran, represent some leftist bent.

   It is not surprising, however, that during a meet-up, with coded terms, between the two at a diner near Bakersfield, California, these two men quickly discover they both blame everything on the US government—although today I might be able to imagine that they could be very happy with our current fascist leaders—and discover in their trade of arms that their own hearts and arms quickly open up to one another.

     This is a terribly painful film to watch, however, despite its satirical intentions, given that it connects political extremism left or right, with being gay.

       Or perhaps these two sad boys, who have both destroyed their own families, are not so very gay as just desperate for love, which they rediscover in one another during a rainy night where they shack up together to share drugs, no liquor since Abdul doesn’t drink, allowed in their “holy” texts. Bobbo admits that his groups sells Meth in order to support their cause. And Abdul has a full bag of potent mesquite.

       One might be tempted to read this little satire as a kind of redo of Red River where the moral values of the civilized world have been pushed out onto the edges of a sadly immoral society, the two “cowboys” in this case poking machine guns into each other’s mouths instead of simply showing off their personal shotguns and their expertise with them. Nonetheless, they spend a night with their arms wrapped around one another, and when Bobbo suddenly rises early and begins to drive off, Abdul’s intense cry of “Bobbo,” sounds more like a call for Shane than anything else.

       This time the magic “partner” does return, allowing suddenly the two men to let out all they pent up lust that they might otherwise use to mow down thousands of innocent individuals. Their shared hate is perhaps momentarily transformed into a temporary and most uneasy political spectrum of intense love.

        But, of course, in the real world this isn’t, alas, the way it works, and the guns they have put to each other’s head earlier in the evening might have just as easily gone off, and turned this satire into a standard political adventure story, with the local police detectives dragging their tired bodies off to the Old Desert Café to solve the case of how two such men of such alternative versions of destruction had even found a way to meet-up in the heart of American evil.

       Even if I might say I’m a little amused by the pretenses of this short film, and still can’t admit to truly liking it.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).